Tom Stoppard
I. Introduction to Tom Stoppard
Sir Tom Stoppard (born 3 July 1937) is a British
screenwriter and playwright. He has written plays such as The
Coast of Utopia, Arcadia, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are
Dead, and Rock 'n' Roll. He co-wrote the screenplays for Brazil
and Shakespeare in Love.
Tom Stoppard's playwrighting career embodies a
fascinating clash of opposites. In an interview, he once said, "I
don't write plays for discussion." Yet his writings have been the
subject of dozens of academic books and hundreds of critical
articles. He has also commented "I've never felt . . . that art is
important." Yet many of his characters continually ponder the
significance of theater, indeed, the significance all the arts, as
part of a perpetual (forever) search for meaning.
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He is regarded as the
most intellectual dramatist of
our time, and his works are
permeated (pervade) with
cultural allusions and a
remarkable
depth
of
scholarship in a dizzying
array of fields. Yet his formal
education ended after the
second year of high school.
Finally, despite Stoppard's
stature
as
a
"serious"
playwright,
his
writings
overflow with fun: parodies,
puns, and verbal byplay
across multiple languages.
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Career
By 1960, he had completed his first play A Walk on the Water, which was
later re-packaged as 1968's Enter a Free Man. Stoppard noted that the work
owed much to Robert Bolt’s and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Within a
week after sending A Walk on the Water to an agent, Stoppard received his
version of the "Hollywood-style telegrams that change struggling young artists'
lives." His first play was optioned, later staged in Hamburg, and then broadcast
on British Independent Television in 1963.
From September 1962 until April 1963, Stoppard worked in London as a
drama critic for Scene magazine, writing reviews and interviews both under his
name and the pseudonym William Boot (taken from Evelyn Waugh's Scoop). In
1964, a Ford Foundation grant enabled Stoppard to spend 5 months writing in a
Berlin mansion, emerging with a one-act play titled Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Meet King Lear, which later evolved into his Tony-winning play
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. In the following years, Stoppard
produced several works for radio, television and the theater, including "M" is
for Moon Among Other Things (1964), A Separate Peace (1966) and If You're
Glad I'll Be Frank (1966).
On 11 April 1967 — following acclaim at the 1966 Edinburgh Festival —
the opening of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead in a National Theatre
production at the Old Vic made Stoppard an overnight success.
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Over the next ten years, in addition to writing some of his
own works, Stoppard translated various plays into English,
including works by Slawomir Mrozek, Johann Nestroy,
Arthur Schnitzler, and Vaclav Havel. It was at this time that
Stoppard became influenced by the works of Polish and
Czech absurdists. He has been co-opted into the Outrapo
group, a far-from-serious French movement to improve
actors' stage technique through science.
"Stoppardian" has become a term used to refer to works
in which an author makes use of witty statements to create
comedy while addressing philosophical concepts.
Stoppard was voted the number 76 on the 2008 Time 100,
Time magazine's list of the most influential people in the
world.
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Personal life
Stoppard has been married twice,
to Josie Ingle (1965–1972), a
nurse, and to Miriam Stoppard
(née Stern and subsequently
Miriam Moore-Robinson, 1972–
1992), whom he left to begin a
relationship with actress Felicity
Kendal. He has two sons from
each marriage, including the
actor Ed Stoppard and Will
Stoppard, who is married to
violinist Linzi Stoppard.
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Theatre:
Stoppard‘s plays deal with philosophical issues while presenting
verbal wit and visual humour. The linguistic complexity of his works,
with their puns, jokes, innuendo(影射、暗讽）, and other wordplay,
is a chief characteristic of his work. Many also feature multiple
timelines.
One place to begin with Stoppard, however, is to recognize
that after he left school at the age of seventeen, he worked for a
few years as a journalist, including several months as a drama
critic. This career seems to have inspired in him an almost
scientific curiosity about people's behavior, a fascination with
how they attempt to maintain personal, emotional, and intellectual
balance as they wander through the uncertainties of life. Indeed,
the main characters in virtually all his plays conduct a perpetual
struggle to affirm their beliefs and values in a bewildering world.
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Works
Nowhere is this theme more evident than in Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967), Stoppard's first international
success. Here he dramatizes the plight of two peripheral
characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet, as they meander in and
out of the turmoil that ravages the Danish court of Elsinore. The
two men are unaware that Prince Hamlet has been ordered by his
father's Ghost to revenge the murder of this father, the King, at
the hands of Claudius, now ruler of Denmark and husband of
Gertrude, Hamlet's mother. Nor have they any sense of the social,
political, religious, and sexual implications of this crisis. All they
know is that they have been summoned to discover why Hamlet,
their old school chum, seems so distressed. Stoppard weaves
scenes from Shakespeare with his own sparkling dialogue,
creating a memorable portrait of two little men who seek to
understand a world hopelessly beyond their ken.
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From time to time, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
encounter some Players who entertain at Hamlet's court,
and at those moments, the two lost souls tend to regard
themselves as actors on the stage of life. This theme is
developed further in one of Stoppard's most successful
short plays, The Real Inspector Hound (1968), in
which two theater critics, casually reviewing a
preposterous thriller, are drawn reluctantly into the
conflict onstage. On one level, Hound is a delightful
spoof of critical jargon and the pomposity that
characterizes Stoppard's former profession. Yet more
subtly it suggests how any of us, thinking ourselves
safe from the hubbub of the world, may nonetheless be
whisked unwillingly and even fatally into the chaos.
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Stoppard's next major play, Jumpers (1972), accomplishes
the seemingly impossible task of bringing the world of
contemporary philosophy to the theatre. Throughout the play,
the protagonist, who shares the name of twentieth-century
British philosopher G. E. Moore, prepares for an academic
debate on the nature of moral values. His ruminations are
frequently interrupted, however, by the shenanigans of a troupe
of renegade gymnast/philosophers who, believe it or not, have
seized the British government. Part of the background to these
bizarre goings-on is the 1969 landing on the moon, and the
way that this event, so Stoppard suggests, altered humanity's
perception of itself. The play is ultimately a reaction against
the modern denial of values, and an affirmation that something
inherent within us makes us human, and allows us to maintain
faith in goodness and beauty.
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Stoppard's first attempt to create historical drama was
Travesties (1974), which uses as a starting point the
coincidence that novelist James Joyce, Russian revolutionary
Lenin, and Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara all lived in Zurich,
Switzerland during World War I. No historical evidence
indicates that the three ever encountered one another, but in
Stoppard's imagination they do so. The text is complicated by
the use of an elderly narrator, whose frazzled memory muddles
details of plot beyond description. In the midst of the confusion,
though, we may discern parallels between the goals of the
artistic revolutionary and those of the political revolutionary, as
well as the need for all individuals to establish a purpose for
their existence.
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These brief outlines suggest some of the themes
that have buttressed Stoppard's extensive dramatic
output. In more recent works, he has moved through a
great range of political, social, religious, and
scientific issues, many of which may be found in
Arcadia, along with perspectives on Time, Poetry,
Love, and other subjects too numerous to elucidate
here. Perhaps the most important point to remember,
though, is that no matter how intellectually daunting
the material, Arcadia is, in fact, a "play," and that at
its foundation lies a joy and creative energy to be
found uniquely in the magic of theater.
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II. Analysis of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern Are Dead
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead, Tom Stoppard's best-known
and first major play, appeared initially
as an amateur production in
Edinburgh, Scotland, in August of
1966.
Subsequent
professional
productions in London and New York
in 1967 made Stoppard an
international sensation and three
decades and a number of major plays
later Stoppard is now considered one
of the most important playwrights in
the latter half of the twentieth century.
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Recognized still today as a consistently clever and daring comic playwright,
Stoppard startled and captivated audiences for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead when he retold the story of Shakespeare's Hamlet as an absurdist-like
farce, focusing on the point of view of two of the famous play's most
insignificant characters. In Shakespeare's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are
little more than plot devices, school chums summoned by King Claudius to
probe Hamlet's bizarre behavior at court and then ordered to escort Hamlet to
England (and his execution) after Hamlet mistakenly kills Polonius.
Hamlet escapes Claudius's plot and engineers instead the executions of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whose deaths are reported incidentally after
Hamlet returns to Denmark. In Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
become the major characters while the Hamlet figures become plot devices, and
Stoppard's wildly comic play becomes the story of two ordinary men caught up
in events they could neither understand nor control. Stoppard's play immediately
invited comparisons with Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and also brought
to mind George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Luigi Pirandello.
"Stoppardian" is now a recognizable epithet that suggests extraordinary verbal
wit and the comic treatment of philosophical issues in often bizarre theatrical
contexts.
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Themes of the Play
1. Language and Communication
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the two title
characters often play with words. They pun off of each other's
words without much intention of moving their dialogue
toward a set purpose. Instead, they are simply goofing around,
like two kids throwing a ball back and forth. At the same time,
however, the consistently poor communication in the play
seems to hint at a broader breakdown in understanding
between the characters that may help send the play into its
tragic spiral. Language is sometimes seen as an empowering
way of writing one's own fate, but for Ros and Guil it often
seems like an impotent tool, best suited for idle speculation.
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2. Isolation
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, main
characters Ros and Guil, when left alone in the play, often
suffer from feelings of isolation. In the opening and
closing scenes of the play, it is just Ros and Guil alone on
stage. One wonders if it is the degree to which these two
are isolated that has led to their constant idleness and
passivity, or if things worked the other way around. From
the very start of the play, however, it does seem as if Ros
and Guil are marked, as if they are moving toward their
deaths, simply passing through the action of the play. The
sense of isolation reaches its highest pitch, perhaps, when
it is just the two of them in the dark on the boat in the last
act. It is, in a sense, a premonition of death, or a fear of
what death might be: bodiless nothingness, with only the
mind working.
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3. Manipulation（操纵）
People use each other quite a
bit
in
Rosencrantz
and
Guildenstern are Dead, and part of
the reason the main characters, Ros
and Guil, are never in control of
their situation is because they seem
naively incapable of using the
people around them. Manipulation,
in many ways, is compared the act
of directing a play – it's the ability
to control the course of events. A
play is explored as something that
manipulates
the
audience:
something that attempts to affect
the way that they think and feel.
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4. Fear
In the opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,
there is a long string of coin flips that come up heads, which
frightens Guil, one of the main characters. He later attempts to
reason through how the laws of probability could seemingly be
suspended, and at one point concludes, "The scientific
approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against
the pure emotion of fear" (1.73). What Guil means is that we
fear the unknown (such as death). Science, by trying to make
things comprehensible, attempts to reduce this fear. By coming
to know things about our world and the laws by which it works,
we try to feel more at home in it, more like we have a handle
on what is happening. The alternative – recognizing just how
little we know about the world around us – causes fear.
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5. Foolishness and Folly
In many ways, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead it
is the title characters' fault that they die. They are easily, and, at
times, willingly manipulated. Not to mention, Ros and Guil
spend a good portion of the play messing around – swapping
names, misunderstanding each other, playing at games of their
own devising. Their foolishness is, in part, a source of comedy,
but it also seems a natural way to stay entertained when one has
as little to do.
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6. Passivity
Ros and Guil may be at the center of the action in
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but they
certainly don't drive it. It can be seen most clearly in
Act II how they are just left to sit around and wait
unless someone else crosses the stage or tells them
what to do. Another main character, the Player, seems
to suggest that they should be more active and that Guil
shouldn't waste so much time questioning things, but
Guil is less concerned with action than with freedom of
action. Yet, in the end, the fact that Ros and Guil betray
their friend Hamlet makes their passivity morally
significant; their failure to act may play a role in their
own fates.
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7. Versions of Reality
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the play-within-a-play is
packed within a clear context and is used by Hamlet to send a
message to Claudius. For us as the audience of Stoppard's
play, however, the distinctions between a play and reality get
totally jumbled. First, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is
nothing but a play on the stage. Secondly, it is a play that
interacts with the action of an earlier play, Shakespeare's
Hamlet. Third, it is unclear to what extent the Player and his
Tragedians are driving the action of the play and to what
extent the "real" characters are in control of what is
happening. The difference between drama and reality is called
into question, most explicitly in the arguments between Guil
and the Player.
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8. Fate and Free Will
This theme is introduced in the very first scene of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where the long string
of coins tosses coming up "heads" seems to suggest that the laws
of probability have been suspended. The way that fate operates
in the play is largely through the words of William Shakespeare.
Since Stoppard's play works within the framework of
Shakespeare's Hamlet, his characters are bound to undergo a
certain series of events – their fate was "written" in 1600. Main
characters Guil and Ros have the most freedom when they
manage to get out of the action of the Hamlet storyline, but in
these times they often find themselves bored and listless. The
relationship between Stoppard's play and Shakespeare's allows
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to ask the question: to
what degree do fate and chance control our own lives?
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9. Morality
So, you probably noticed that the word "dead" in the title
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and that there is a lot
of discussion of death in the play. Stoppard's play is intensely
aware of the fact that we will all, one day, die. It is also aware
of the fact that death simply cannot be captured in art. The
main character, Guil, sees death as the negative, as a blind spot
in the mind – something that humans are incapable of thinking
about. As a result, he sees acted out deaths in plays as pretense
– claiming to put something on stage that one cannot. In
contrast, Guil's rival, the Player, thinks that no one can tell the
difference between an acted death and a real one, and he thus
decides to give his audiences the sort of entertainment they
want – death, and lots of it.
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Shakespeare in Love
Written by
Tom Stoppard